Hardwood flooring generally consists of a number of elongate tongue-and-groove type planks individually fitted close to one another and then fastened in position to a subjacent subfloor. To fasten these hardwood planks to the subfloor of a room composed for example of plywood plates or floor joists, it is known to use a mallet-operated nailer. Such a nailer generally comprises a main body with a floor-engageable shoe mounted to its bottom surface, upon which the tool rests against a hardwood plank prior to discharging a fastener in the latter. Such a nailer also comprises a magazine holding fasteners such as straight metallic L- or T-shaped barbed straight cleats or U-shaped straight staples, and feeding them to a fastener discharge mechanism.
To fasten a hardwood plank to the subfloor, a workman has to lay the nailer onto a hardwood plank, and then use a mallet to strike an anvil member of the fastener discharge mechanism. When a mallet strikes the anvil member of the tool, a straight and elongated plunger of the fastener discharge mechanism is axially actuated to strike a cleat held in the magazine, this cleat being then forcibly ejected out of the tool. In order to achieve better anchoring of the plank to the subfloor, some nailers drive the fasteners through the plank and into the subfloor in an oblique direction (for example at 45° from the horizontal direction), as opposed to being driven in the planks vertically.
However, known nailers driving fasteners in an oblique fashion in hardwood planks cannot reach areas very close to upright walls. The reason for this is inter alia that the whole nailer tool itself, including its main piston and the trigger valve thereof, are at 45° from the vertical, and also the anvil member which upwardly diverges towards the upright wall, and thus there is no clearance available for passage of the mallet during striking action of the anvil member, or even for a tool released by a power assist hand trigger (that does not need mallet strike). The hardwood planks located parallel to an upright wall in closely spaced fashion cannot be anchored to the subfloor using such nailers, and the fasteners must instead be driven vertically, e.g. using a manual hammer and nail, into the hardwood plank edge portions adjacent to walls.